Data journalism in broadcast news and video: 27+ examples to inspire and educate

The best-known examples of data journalism tend to be based around text and visuals — but it’s harder to find data journalism in video and audio. Ahead of the launch of my new MA in Data Journalism I thought I would share my list of the examples of video data journalism that I use with students in exploring data storytelling across multiple platforms. If you have others, I’d love to hear about them.

FOI stories in broadcast journalism

Freedom of Information stories are one of the most common situations when broadcasters will have to deal with more in-depth data. These are often brought to life by through case studies and interviewing experts.

In 2015, for example, a former and then-current MA student worked with the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme on FOI responses from 42 police forces relating to violence in schools. The online version of the story included an interview with a former teacher affected by the issue (captured in the gif above).

Also at the BBC David Rhodes won a Royal Statistical Society award for this data journalism story about councils refusing care applications.

In Ireland broadcaster RTE’s data journalist Karrie Kehoe worked on this investigation into “the widespread failure to implement the 2008 Hospital Consultants Contract and the impact this is having on Ireland’s healthcare system”.

Striking statistics

Hans Rosling, who died earlier this year, did much to popularise the use of statistics and data visualisation. His engaging presentation style led BBC4 to commission a series on “The Joy of Stats“. Here’s one of the highlights:

Vox are specialists at using data to illustrate stories. Here’s their explainer on gun violence:

There’s also a version which is used natively in social media: this tweet has been liked and retweeted tens of thousands of times alone at the time of writing.

Network analysis in video

Network analysis — analysing relationships between actors in a story — is becoming more and more widely used. Here are a couple of examples where a broadcaster has used it: first, the BBC’s Newsnight leans on a galactic metaphor…

The data isn’t on screen — but it’s behind the story

One of the reasons it’s not always easy to think of good examples of data journalism in video and audio is because the data itself is hidden. Channel 4’s investigative programme Dispatches often features investigations where data analysis is involved, but it’s not always obvious in the programme itself.

Britain’s Hidden Child Abuse – shown below – involved compiling spreadsheets to demonstrate the scale of the problem, which also helped one reporter to identify recurring reasons why people did not involve the police authorities.

Those spreadsheets were also crucial in convincing the lawyers that they could defend any legal action.

I also quite like this social video, which is really about a data comparison (the same information could have been presented in a chart):

Web-native video

Data video journalism doesn’t have to be made for broadcast. Many of the stories that I’ve worked on in the BBC England data unit have included a video clip. This investigation we did into library cuts includes a caption-led video on how one prominent library has been affected by the cuts.

Across social media the BBC also used a short clip to illustrate some of the key statistics from the story:

As an aside, many radio stations reported on the story by interviewing librarian Lauren Smith, and well known authors.

Can you add any?

These are just some of the examples I’ve come across in video and broadcast media (I’ll look at audio in a separate post). I’m always on the look-out for new examples, so please let me know if you’ve seen others.